Page 126 of Disarm
We sit in silence for a few seconds.
“So,” she says gently. “You texted yesterday that you’d told your father about your relationship.”
I let my head thunk back against the wall. “Yeah.”
“How are you feeling about that now?” she asks.
“Like I went skydiving without checking if the parachute was packed right,” I say. “I’m alive, technically. The ground is approaching. I have no idea if I’m gonna break my legs when I land.”
Her mouth twitches. “That’s quite the metaphor,” she says. “Walk me through the jump. What happened?”
I tell her about the text from Dad. The way his voice sounded too calm when he asked about Reno. The moment he brought up Harrington and “a dinner with Miguel.” The way my throat closed when he asked if it was a date.
I tell her about the word “experimental,” how it made my stomach flip, and how I wanted to crawl out of my skin.
How I blurted out that Miguel is the reason I’m still here. How Dad went quiet. How he said he didn’t know it got that bad. How he apologized—for making me feel like a project, for talking to me like a stack of numbers instead of a person.
And I tell her about the other part—the one still chewing on my rib cage. The way he said he’s “processing.” That he doesn’t “agree.” That he’s “worried” but not disowning me. That he wants to talk to both of us.
When I’m done, my voice feels scraped raw.
Dr. Kaur is quiet for a moment, pen still.
“That’s a lot,” she says finally. “Thank you for telling me all of it.”
I pick at a loose thread on my jeans. “I keep waiting for the follow-up call where he tells me he thought about it and decided actually, never mind, this is too much, you’re too much.”
“That’s what your anxiety is telling you,” she says. “Is it what your father actually said?
I glare at the ceiling. “No.”
“What did he actually say?” she prompts.
I sigh. “That he doesn’t want to lose me. That he wants to learn. That he’s struggling, but he’s… trying, I guess.”
She nods. “So the fear is about what he might do. Not what he has done.”
“Yeah.” My chest tightens. “But when your brain’s wired like mine, ‘might’ feels like ‘already.’”
“I know,” she says. “Your nervous system has lived in constant threat mode for a long time. Anticipating danger was adaptive, remember? It kept you safe when you were younger.”
“Yay, survival,” I mutter.
She smiles slightly. “The problem is that same alarm is now going off when the danger is hypothetical. Your father could still respond poorly down the line. He could also surprise you. Right now, what we have is… ambivalence. Discomfort. And some genuine effort.”
Her eyes soften. “How did it feel, hearing him apologize?”
I chew on my lip. “Good,” I admit. “And awful. Like some part of me wanted to believe him, wanted to let that apology fix ten years at once. And another part was like, nah, we remember all the times he didn’t say that. We remember the stat sheets. The speeches about discipline.”
“So there’s a tug-of-war,” she says. “Between the part that’s desperate for his approval and the part that doesn’t trust him not to hurt you again.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And then there’s the part that’s like, ‘Hey, you have Miguel. Why do you still care what Dad thinks?’ And then another part that’s like, ‘Because his opinion is oxygen, obviously, do you even know us?’”
She huffs a quiet laugh. “It sounds crowded in there.”
“You have no idea.”
She leans back a little. “Where is Miguel in all this for you right now?”
